Message from the Executive Director

GSPM on the International Stage

Have questions or ideas? Share them with me via This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or add them to the GSPM blog for the whole community.

I was supposed to be in Mexico City, where I was to represent the GSPM at an international conference on electoral strategy, hosted by our friends at the Instituto Tecnico Autonomo de Mexico (ITAM), the Mexican Technical Institute. It would have been nice to be out of Washington for a few days to see what un-snowed terrain looks like...Oh well.

This year would have been my third presentation at the conference, held annually by ITAM. The conference brings together US and Latin American political strategists, campaign managers, and politics reporters to study key trends in political strategy, campaigns that have occurred in the Americas in the preceding year, and policy challenges facing the region.

In 2008 and 2009, my topic was the presidential campaign -- how it was going (in April 2008) and how it played out (February 2009). This year I was asked to talk about the less exciting, but more important, work of what happens after you win -- how does a candidate turn a campaign promise into policy action? Rallies, volunteers, and a great website no longer suffice. The president must accomplish tasks to govern, where the candidate need only suggest what must be done after the election.

In the US system, we don't like to see any one player with too much power and we have constructed a challenging array of competing power centers that must somehow come together to get anything done. Hard as it is to win the numerous primaries needed to get your party's nomination, and hard as it is to run the 50 state campaigns needed to win the White House, the slog of governing is vastly more difficult: your team can't manage everything as tightly as they could in the campaign, and the other branches (to say nothing of the other party, of course) have their own ideas of what needs to be done, too.

I feel a little like we are in a similar pickle here at the GSPM. As we kick off our planning for the new strategic plan, we will be able to maintain a lot of excitement and energy as we explore new options, discuss possibilities, and set our course for the next several years. Devising the strategy is like the campaign – exciting, and action-packed.

Then the hard work begins. We will have to execute against our plan, meet our stated goals, and accomplish the tasks we will be setting for ourselves. The boring business of work takes over, and we cannot lose our energy then -- just like the successful candidate who gets stunned with the difficulty of governing, we will need to stay focused as a team and keep pushing ourselves.

I look forward to the whole deal -- both the exciting part of thinking through our strategy, and the hard work of making it happen. Together, we can do it -- together being the key point here.

Strategic Planning

Have questions or ideas? Share them with me via This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or add them to the GSPM blog for the whole community.

One of the big tasks we face as a community this semester is the rewriting of GSPM's strategic plan. We last did a full plan in 2003, and that five-year plan is now seriously out-of-date.

This week the leadership team began the process of creating the new plan with an exercise to identify our strengths and weaknesses. That was a great session, and I thought everybody involved brought great ideas and great energy to the effort.

We will be producing a draft of the plan in the next several weeks, and we will share that with the whole community. I hope to hear from current students, alumni, faculty and our friends and supporters out there – this plan needs to reflect the best thinking of all of us.

To that end, I am pleased to invite everyone to the first of our monthly community forum meetings, on Wednesday, February 17, 2010 from 7-8 PM in the Marvin Center (Room 402). We will have one of these every month from now on, and it will be on a different night each month so class schedules will not lock anybody out from attending at least some of the meetings.

So get ready to take part in defining the next five years of GSPM, and helping us to build on what we have accomplished in our first 23 years.

Politics: The Business of People

Have questions or ideas? Share them with me via This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or add them to the GSPM blog for the whole community.

So last week I was reading the Friday Update and was very interested in the careers question and answer. A student asked Mag Gottlieb for some advice on entering the profession at a level commensurate with his/her talents, and got a nice answer about working hard and networking and all the things you have to do to be successful.

I liked the answer, but I would have come at it from a different angle. Not surprising to me, but Mag is significantly kinder than I am. I would have told the student – and anybody else who came in to see me about their future – that you will not ever get a decent job in this business without the right attitude.

What I read in the question was an attitude of entitlement – since I am smart and know my stuff, I should not have to pay my dues like the little people do.

Wow. Try that in most offices in this town and the hiring official or search committee will sniff it out in a second, and you aren’t getting that job.

Politics is a business of people. It is about emotions and values and connections and if you present yourself as better than everyone else, you can’t do the job.

Start with whatever job gets you in the door at the place where you want to be. Answer the phones. Get the coffee. Smile and love it. And earn the chance to show them what you have – then your native talents will shine, reinforced by your willingness to support the team effort.

Above the gates of Royal Military College Sandhurst is a simple note carved in stone: Serve to lead. Officers are trained and brought into service to lead; that is what they do. But the saying also calls them to serve their followers – only then do you have the moral authority to lead them well.

Why not do that in your political career, too? That should be the GSPM way, and following it will get you somewhere in politics.

What do you think – This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , drop by, or raise issues on the GSPM blog so we can all talk about them together. And please look for dates on the first GSPM community forum, in early February – we are working space for the forum and will invite you all to join us for it.